Over the past two decades, the promise of accelerated drug development and personalized medicine have brought heighten attention to the field of biomarker. But do you really know what biomarker are, how they are developed, and how they are used?
Here, I'll share over 15 years of experience in the fields of biomarker development and translational research to try to answer some of these questions.

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Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Alternative Use of Neuroimaging: A Public Perception Survey

In the
October 4th issue of Plos One, Wardlaw and colleagues published the
results of a survey about the public and the expert perception of neuroimaging use
in society (link).This fascinating societal insight in the
current and future use of neuroimaging highlights an often overlook aspect of
biomarker and diagnostic research: the potential adoption barrier caused by conflicting
information propagated by the general media.Indeed, the development of some new, or even established, technologies can be
thwarted by excessive regulations stemming from unwarranted fears propagated by
a media industry hungry for sensational sound bites.

In
this case, the authors focused on assessing the opinions of the general public
and of medical experts on the medical and non-medical use of neuroimaging in
modern society.In particular, the authors
sought to gather opinions about the claim that modern neuroimaging can be used
for detecting lies in a judicial context, preferences in a marketing context,
and racial attitude in a social context.

While
the public and the experts all agreed that conventional medical uses of neuroimaging
(i.e. detection of brain pathology and certain mental illness) are trustworthy
and well established, both groups showed little faith in uses of neuroimaging
in non-medical applications.However,
the survey revealed that the experts had little awareness of the use of neuroimaging
in US court, grossly underestimating the number of cases where neuroimaging have
been used as evidence over the past few years.Similarly, a third of the experts reported no familiarity with the use
of neuroimaging in the fields of neuromarkerting and commercial lie-detection.Interestingly, although the majority of
experts felt that the actual state of neuroimaging was not accurately
represented by the general media, few felt compelled to rectify the situation.

Looking
ahead, the experts were generally more optimistic about the future of
neuroimaging than the general public.While
the relative skepticism from the public may provide some degree of protection
against the misrepresentation of neuroimaging capabilities by the general
media, the relative enthusiasm of the experts means that there is no shortage
of expert opinions that can be used out of context by the general media to
promote sensational claims about neuroimaging capabilities.

Although
this paper does not intend to address the entire field of biomarker and
diagnostic development, these findings should serve as a lesson for the entire field.Consistent communication about the true capabilities
of a new biomarker / diagnostic technology should be an integral part of the
final stage of diagnostic development.Failing to do so could result in the public misperception of the
advantage and/or risk of a new promising technology.